A wee bit of fame.
In following on to this article with regards to this Charlie Northrop guy and his broadly applicable patents, I had an idea:
Why not bring the tech community into a project to defeat "bogus patents" with prior art?
I emailed the idea to the article writer, and he has posted it up on the front page of the website, here's the article.
That article at Sys-con talks about how the USPTO cannot keep up with all the obscure claims some of these patent manufacturers are claiming, so I replied to the writer with this idea:
An "open" project in the tech community, with participation from the USPTO, to screen prior art for patent-defeating capability. Then, the good candidates are selected, and the prior art claim made for each.
And if there could be made a law forcing all bogus-patent-holders to return monies received due to lawsuits against patent violators, then it turns the whole "patent pending" fear onto the patent holders if they go about [getting away with vague or obscure patents with far-reaching consequences] and suing people, as this guy Northrop is doing.
Since the USPTO hasn't the capability, they should rely on the "peer review" of the Internet community to provide "prior art" searching and screening to cut out the work they have to do.
[I'll also add this, in hindsight]
This then fills the USPTO's deficit on resources to verify obscure claims and find prior art, relying on an enthusiastic group of people with tremendous knowledge and sense of purpose, to help in ensuring that new patents are new and innovative and for the purpose of advancing technology & science, instead of obvious and far-reaching and designed to go into a holding company of lawyers and lawsuits.
Comments
An observation....
which is very easy to make is that patent examiners aren't nearly as well paid as the patent agents/lawyers who draft the patents.
The USPTO patent agent exams are commonly accepted to be one of the two most difficult professional certifications to obtain (pass rate ~20%, the other certification with similar pass rate is the CFA).
Therefore, the l33t people drafting and submitting the applications are way better trained, more motivated, usually smarter, and are more expert in their domain than those who are examining their submissions.
Thus, the resulting botch-up is predictable.
The solution.
That's why you get public participation - Open/Free source make claims of high reliability, low bug count through peer review. That's the same thing that this project would do - peer review intellectual property by people who know about it.
I've heard similar things...
from Greg Aharonian and others. An open review period has been much discussed, but few would support shortening the 18-month application disclosure schedule. Actually there's nothing to stop anyone from doing an open review except the money it would cost to challenge a patent. And the other things you mention would I think require legislation, so it'd hit a political brick wall.